Not really aware of entering Holland, after Belgium. Antwerp’s eight-lane highway, with its ugly blocks of flats and McDonald’s every five minutes. Flat, uninteresting countryside – they never really caught on with hedges, did they, the Dutch? Wind turbines, miles and miles of new developments, factories, power stations, car lots. I am cringingly aware of my vulnerability in amongst the roaring, speeding juggernauts on these icy roads. Overtaken by three bikes, all of whom waved. I can’t remember when a Brit biker last waved hello. While I was growing up with bikes throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all motorcyclists would dip a chin or raise a finger. Not anymore. Different people ride bikes now. Then, you did it because it was in your jeans. Now people ride them because they’re, like, you know, cool.

I stop for a break at a petrol station, and stand beside the bike, sipping coffee and watching motorcycles and cars and lorries roar along the Czech highway. A dog barks in the field behind the trees, while above, very high cloud the colour of sour milk hides the sun. It’s muggy for April. The reality slowly surfaces, and at last I smile. I am doing what I’ve wanted to do all my adult life. The miles and hours of high white cloud have suddenly been swept away, leaving behind a glorious, sunny afternoon. It’s not quite sleeping-out weather yet, though, so after trundling round the pretty little town of Svitavy in a futile search for a cheap pension I book into a hotel just outside town: £30 for a double room, bathroom, TV, tea and coffee-making facilities, breakfast, air conditioning etc.

I look out of the window. In the dusk, beyond the garden, the road, the land around the SS building, are the headlights of cars driving along the road by the railway line that transported so much immeasurable and unimaginable suffering to many hundreds of thousands of people, and the disbelief is . . . total. Incomprehension, that that is the very same road as can be seen in all the wartime photographs, and the railway which I have been following. This building is sponsored by the Catholic Church, but I can’t help but feel that salvation for the inmates of KL Auschwitz didn’t come via the Almighty, who had ignored it for the previous four years, but via the men of the Red Army. When I reach Krakow, I go straight to the Saski, an elegant old place near the centre with a uniformed doorman and an iron and brass lift and many carpeted corridors along to my room on the top floor.

The road between Krakow and Zakopane is undergoing massive works, so it’s endless adverts and diesel fumes and 60km before I can do 80kph. We pass through a patch of cut-grass smell, and then there’s two pretty girls hitch-hiking northwards, something I’ve not seen in Britain for decades. Mile after mile of green sprinkled and banded by bright yellow dandelions, and roadside stalls selling goatskin and sheepskin rugs begin to appear. A young girl stands in the middle of a field with her cow and blonde ponytail and slim blue jeans. Three hours later, it all becomes alpiney, with log cabins and big advertising hoardings, mostly for rooms. When the Tatry finally appear through the spring haze, an unbroken line that fills the horizon, their sides and cols streaked with snow, I stop for petrol, then climb over a wooden fence to sit on a grassy bank and revel in the sun.

We cross the border into Slovakia, riding through a rich area of huge modern villas, neat and tidy old prosperous farms with ancient tractors in yards and glossy horses in fields, and many pokoj for rent in a landscape of hills and woods of many greens beneath a sky which is wide and blue. We pass through a small town where I see my first gypsies, walking along the dusty verge, very dark skinned, with moustaches, brawny arms and laden with big blue IKEA bags. Then I see where they were walking to: on the very edge of town, just after a huge sign informing motorists that the next branch of Tescos is 64km away, there is a little shanty village of ramshackle huts and lean-toes and decrepit dwellings surrounded by patches of beaten yellow dirt. Dogs wander aimlessly and in a large open area an old man sits alone in a wheelchair.

Trencin, just before the Czech border. Although there are dozens of pensions and hotels, I follow signs for a campsite, which take me across the river and onto an island, and through a gaudy area of 1970s recreational facilities, with the concrete and the steel pool and the stadium all painted in faded colours. I check in at the campsite office/shop. There’s a motorcyclist in here, a short, pot-bellied man in his forties wearing a leather jacket with tassels up and down the sleeves and across the shoulders, above a skull and crossed bones and the legend Black Kings. He seems nervous, pointing here and there and glancing round at me. His shopping consists of packets of noodles, twenty Marlboro cigarettes, some cake, some jam, and now a small bottle of vodka, which he slips into a jacket pocket before shooting me a challenging look on his way out.